Migrate from Merlin to Zoho CRM

Merlin account metadata (email, plan tier, creation date) extracts from account settings. We create Zoho Users by matching the Merlin account email to a provisioned Zoho user. Owner assignment on migrated records uses this mapping. If the Merlin user does not yet have a Zoho account, they are provisioned by the customer's admin before record import.

Merlin chat threads migrate to Zoho Note records. The conversation text (all turns concatenated) becomes the Note body. We link each Note to a parent record — a Zoho Contact or Account if entity extraction identified a related party, or a dummy holding Account if no entity was found. Merlin's conversation timestamp becomes the Note Created Date for timeline ordering.

For customers who want activity timeline parity with a traditional CRM, we offer a configuration option where each Merlin conversation becomes a Zoho Task with Subject = conversation title, Description = full transcript, and Status = completed. This is scoped during discovery; the default is Note-based migration to keep the Zoho CRM activity timeline clean.

PDF, PowerPoint, and Word files uploaded to Merlin's Document Chat migrate as Zoho Attachments. We preserve the file binary, original filename, and upload timestamp. Attachments are linked to the nearest identified entity (a Zoho Contact or Account if entity extraction surfaced a match) or to a parent Note record if no entity match exists.

Merlin's Document Chat retains the question-and-answer pairs generated against each uploaded file. These migrate as Zoho Notes with rich-text formatting, with the source document attached. This preserves the research context for teams that used Merlin for contract review, market research, or legal document analysis.

Image files generated by Merlin's image feature migrate as Zoho Attachments linked to a designated Image Assets module or to the relevant Account. We preserve creation date and file type. Downstream mapping to a specific Zoho module is customer-defined during scoping.

As a supplementary migration step, we perform entity extraction on all uploaded documents and conversation text to identify person names. Each unique person name becomes a candidate Zoho Contact. We flag potential duplicates based on name and email-domain similarity for the customer's admin to reconcile. This step converts unstructured Merlin content into structured CRM records.

Entity extraction on uploaded documents also surfaces company names, legal entities, and organization references. Each unique company becomes a candidate Zoho Account. We preserve the source document reference so the customer's team can verify the Account-Contact relationship during reconciliation.

When entity extraction identifies email addresses or phone numbers in Merlin documents, we map these to the corresponding Contact's Email and Phone fields in Zoho CRM. This enriches the extracted Contacts and reduces manual data entry after migration.

Merlin does not expose a schema for user-defined properties. No custom property mapping is possible. Any structured data beyond conversation text and file blobs is not accessible for export from Merlin.

Merlin has no documented tagging or labeling system accessible via export. We cannot migrate tags as structured metadata to Zoho CRM tags or any equivalent field.

Merlin is not a sales or deal-tracking platform. No pipeline, deal, or opportunity records exist in Merlin's data model. Zoho CRM pipeline configuration begins as a fresh setup task for the customer's admin after migration, or can be scoped as a supplementary configuration engagement.